My Husband Let Her Imitate His Dead Lover

The divorce papers were twelve pages long.

I had drafted them myself, which felt right. No one else in Manhattan knew Callan Crawford's assets the way I did. No one else knew which holding companies were shells and which ones had teeth. I set the folder on the edge of my desk, aligned the pen beside it, and turned my coffee cup so the handle faced east.

Eleven p.m. Forty-first floor. The city spread out below me like a circuit board—all those lit windows, all those lives running their quiet algorithms behind the glass.

I had been a divorce attorney for nine years. I had sat across from women who wept, women who screamed, women who went very still and did not move for a long time. I had always understood the ones who went still.

I picked up my coffee. Drank it black and scalding, the way I always did. Set it back down.

Tomorrow I would hand Callan the papers. That was all. There was nothing else to decide.

I slid the folder into my bag, shut off the desk lamp, and rode the elevator down to the street alone.

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The penthouse smelled wrong before I got through the foyer.

I noticed it the moment the elevator opened—a fragrance threading through the cool air of the entryway, light and floral and specifically white. Freesia and something warmer underneath. My hand tightened on my bag strap without my permission.

Eliana's perfume.

I stood there for two seconds. Maybe three. Then I walked into the living room.

She was on my sofa.

A woman I had never met, curled into the corner cushions in a pale gold silk robe I recognized immediately—one of Eliana's robes, the one I had kept folded in the cedar chest at the back of our closet because I had not known what else to do with it. The woman was laughing at something on her phone. The laugh was almost right. Almost. The pitch was correct but the rhythm was half a beat off, the sound landing a fraction too late, like a translation rather than the original.

Callan stood at the floor-to-ceiling window with his back to the room. He did not turn when I came in. The city behind him made him look like a silhouette of himself.

"Margo." His voice was flat. Functional. The same voice he used to confirm dinner reservations. "Bianca will be staying with us for a while."

That was all he said.

The woman—Bianca—looked up from her phone. And then her face rearranged itself. I watched it happen, the calculation running just beneath the surface, and then the warmth arrived: a soft smile, a slight tilt of the head, the eyes going gentle in a way that was practiced rather than felt.

I knew every one of those gestures. I had watched the real version of them for four years. I knew the warmth that came before the smile, the way Eliana's eyes always moved a half-second